Other than the plethora of cute cat video’s prowling all over the internet, what on earth do cats have to do with Assortment Planning? Don’t get me wrong, at TXT we love the creativity, challenges and the rubics cube like puzzles that have to be solved as part of many Assortment Planning Projects. We do however recognize that Assortment Planning can be a tough business process to automate...

The discipline of merchandise planning is often not understood by many organizations. What is the ROI that can be expected from a planning organization? In order to answer this effectively you must understand what the practice of merchandise planning is and how it is different from financial planning.

If anyone moved into a Retail career with a goal of slowing down a bit, they must be a little surprised and a lot concerned at this point. After decades of cautious spending on technology (retailers spend less on tech than most other industries no matter how you choose to measure the comparisons…), the past few years have seen a surprising number of “must haves” in terms of supporting technology to enable success at Retail.

In a relatively short time the world of the merchandise office has dramatically changed, and in a manner that has significantly increased complexity.
Addressing competitive differentiation through traditional assortment strategies, (power, convenience and exclusive assortments) has been rendered useless by Amazon who started in books, and has now rewritten the book of retail by offering all 3 strategies simultaneously...

Retail never stands still, we know it well. That’s why we have created this new blog, a space for the retail merchandising community (planning, merchandising, product managers, sourcing and supply chain) where you will find the latest on the market, our opinions on the next big things, and what we believe are the merchandise practices required to succeed in this changing retail world.

Large groups of retailers, sessions focused exclusively on retail planning subjects, multiple locations around the world, and abundant opportunities to network with those in the retail planning community – That describes the Thinking Retail Forum series that was recently held in locations across the globe including Germany, France, Russia, Italy, England, United States and Sweden.